Triumvirate
by settler
Summary: Somehow, Dee's always on the sidelines.  KL, Dee POV


One:

The first time Lee gets back into a viper Dee thinks it's a good thing, that it will make him more alive, bring back some of the man that he was before New Caprica and his command and everything thing else that had weighed him down for the past year.

When she goes to greet him after his flight, she knows that she's right. He's laughing, eyes sparkling, and he looks so much like the man she fell in love with that she closes her eyes and tilts her face to the ceiling in a gesture of contentment.

When she opens them again, Starbuck is blocking her view.

But she can see enough to watch Lee reach out and chuck Starbuck under the chin in a gesture that tries to say "comrade in arms" but ends up so soft and so _intentional_ that it says something else entirely.

Her world tilts just a little as she realizes that his laughter and the weight taken off his shoulders aren't really a result of flying at all. Being in a viper, defying gravity, they're just side benefits for Lee.

The real prize is the woman in front of him, and that woman is not her.

Two:

The cylon had attacked today. They lost four pilots to the raiders, and a sizeable number of the deck crew to blast that buckled bulkheads all along Galactica's starboard side. As a result, everyone in the port-side hangar bay had been trapped for hours while they stabilized the hull and made sure it was safe to open the bay doors.

She had been in CIC when it happened. She had no idea where Lee was. It was his off shift, and she'd had no word for hours. If he had been walking along the starboard side… well, his chances were not good.

She had needed to go down with the recovery crew and check the hangar bay, because if he could have, he would have checked in by now, and that meant he was either trapped or worse.

She was praying, not at all her custom, to find him in the bay, when the crew finally managed to force the hangar doors open.

It was almost unbearably hot: climate control wasn't working well, and there was very little oxygen. Most of it had probably been eaten up by whatever fires had produced the haze of smoke that still blanketed the room.

They found the deck crew first, stripped to their tanks and lying in small groups, under the haze, talking together softly. Most of them were dazed, confused by the smoke and the heat and the shock, and it took a while to find them, spread out across the wreakage as they were. Some of them were badly hurt, and she kept imagining Lee's face on the mangled bodies, and it was making her feel sick. Some of them were relatively unharmed though, and the chief even flipped Dee a passable salute, so she asked him if he had any idea where Lee was.

He gave her a sympathetic look, and she felt the panic rise in her throat before he mumbled something about, "I think I saw him over that way with the pilots."

She broke off from the rest of the rescue crew and made in the direction the Chief had pointed, but she had to pick her way around the wreckage, and the smoke stung her eyes and made it hard to see anything.

She found the pilots within a few minutes. It just took her awhile longer to recognize Lee though the haze. He was stripped down to tanks like everyone else, lying on the floor like everyone else. Unlike everyone else, he was curled around a certain blond pilot, head resting on her stomach, face tilted to look up at her. Her hand was carding though his hair with a gentleness that Dee would have never attributed to Kara Thrace.

She was so focused on that hand that it took her a few moments to realize that Lee was clearly in the shorts and tanks he had slept in last night. She would know, having slept next to him.

He had woken to the alarms, and gone straight to the hangar bay. He hadn't put on his flight suit.

He hadn't wanted to get in a viper, he had wanted to get to her.

She remembers why she never prays to the gods as a random fragment of scripture comes unbidden to her mind. "A man will run to where his treasure is," she thinks.

The lights filtering through the smoke turn Kara's hair into a burnished gold. Lee's shoulders shake once in tired laughter at something Kara says, and he is graced with a small grin in return.

Suddenly it isn't just the smoke that is making her eyes burn.

Three:

They're playing triad in the pilots' mess. She ran out of loot a long time ago, so she's just watching. Lee is about to bet his last pair of socks and Starbuck is grinning so widely that she either has full colors, or she has nothing and is bluffing outrageously.

Dee really doesn't want to think about her husband going around in combat boots all day without an extra layer between them and his feet. He sleeps in her _bed_, for gods sakes, and she doesn't even want to think about how that's going to smell.

Lee doesn't seem too concerned though, and he's generally just as picky as she is about things like hygiene, so she decides that he must think Kara's bluffing. If anyone knows her well enough to tell, it would be him.

But when Kara lays down full colors, Lee just grins and whistles, and doesn't seem at all sorry to see his socks swept into her sizable winnings pile. Kara winks at him, and his smile gets even wider, and that's when Dee realizes that he's been playing a different game entirely.  
The prize isn't socks, or cigars, or magazines. It's something much more fleeting. The look on Kara's face when she wins, the curve of her lip when she bites it in concentration, the way she stares him down when he challenges her.

No, Lee isn't playing triad at all.

She tries to block the questions from her mind, but they pop up anyway, slide in when she isn't paying attention, and then she can't shake them. What kind of game exactly is he playing? And then, the real question: is he playing for keeps?


End file.
